


Riddles & Redemption

by FromTheMouthofKings



Category: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Related Fandoms, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Frodo is a tired cinnamon roll, Gen, Luna and Frodo would be such great bros okay, Luna is a Ravenclaw, Riddles, cannon-typical poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 00:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15158153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromTheMouthofKings/pseuds/FromTheMouthofKings
Summary: In the World Between Worlds, Luna Lovegood and Frodo Baggins contemplate hope, redemption, and their own fictionality.





	1. Chapter 1: Luna

There exists a world between worlds. Grey and formless, for the most part, it stretches between the many fictional universes, binding and connecting them, like a rabbit’s warren or a net. Maybe it existed, empty and unoccupied, before the many fictional worlds were created. Maybe it was created as they were, through influence and cross-reference and allusion. Or maybe it’s newer than the fictional worlds it connects; maybe there was a time when fictional characters froze, dead like cardboard, on the last pages of their stories. To the best of Luna Lovegood’s knowledge, nobody had ever discovered how this world-between-worlds had begun. The characters who lived there only knew that when their respective fictional worlds had ended, they had woken up here.

“Knight to E5,” said Ron Weasley. Luna watched from where she sat, observing the chess game with Harry and Hermione, as Ron’s knight hopped across the board and crushed Draco’s queen into marble shards that melted into the grey mist around them.

Draco Malfoy cursed under his breath, studying the board. “Weasley, if you beat me I swear you’re going to regret it.”

Hermione scoffed. “You know we can’t do any real damage to each other here. Whatever you do to him will be undone if he re-forms. Granted, you do have to ‘die’ to re-form, but on the whole…”

“Shut up, mudblood,” Draco snapped.

Harry’s wand was out of his pocket before Draco had finished speaking. “ _Don’t_ say that again, Malfoy.”

Draco sneered. It made his fair, finely-boned face look ugly. “Or else what, Potter? The…” He took another look at Harry’s wand, pointed squarely at his heart, and seemed to reconsider what he was about to say. “ _Granger_ just said we can’t hurt each other here.”

“There’s more to magic than hurting people, Malfoy,” Harry said. “Want to see if the Bat-Boogie Hex makes you re-form? Ginny’s been giving me lessons.”

The tension crackling through the soft, grey air was making Luna feel sick. She stood up and stepped away from the chess table.

“Going somewhere, Luna?” asked Harry, distracted for a moment from Draco, who huffed sulkily behind him.

“For a walk,” she said, smiling vaguely at him. He accepted that explanation without comment, turning his wand back on Draco.

 

Other characters sometimes complained that the World Between Worlds, with it’s endless, misty, grey expanse, was hard to navigate with any degree of accuracy, but Luna had never found it to be so. She had long since discovered that if she let herself drift, her feet would take her where she needed to be of their own accord.

So she wandered, observing with detached interest as the formless, grey walls closed in around her like a tunnel. With every step she took, her surroundings got darker, until she was walking in the pitch blackness, her footsteps slapping as if on wet stone. She stopped and lit her wand.

She appeared to be in a dark, rough-hewn stone tunnel. Her wand-light glittered off the damp that clung to the walls and pooled on the stone floor. She wasn’t terribly surprised by the shift in her surroundings, though a little curious—bits of scenery had a way of creeping into the World Between Worlds, particularly those that were most personified. They lent the place a little color, and a sense of being back-stage in a theater, where set-pieces are stored between plays. Luna wondered absentmindedly whether the pieces of setting were alive the way that characters were, if fictional characters could even be considered “alive.”

The tunnel curved out of sight ahead. Luna continued on, breathing in the mineral, underground chill of the tunnel. She was curious now to see what would lie at the end of it; she had a deep sense that it was somehow important.

“ _Say it again, precious, say it again.”_ A strange, hissing voice drifted out of the darkness as she rounded the corner and the tunnel opened into a large, rocky chamber. Her wand-light reflected off the edge of a small underground pool.

A second voice sighed and began to recite:

                “ _What can’t be touched, but can be felt,_

_Can’t be put in your hand, but can be held,_

_Can be won, but can’t be bought,_

_Can be found in a foxglove, but in fear there’s naught?_ ”

Luna moved slowly into the cavern, keeping her lit wand aloft. Two figures were sitting on a rock a little way down the shore of the pool from where she stood. Their backs were to her.

The hissing voice came again. “A birdses? No, a nasty, stinging bee, my precious. No…is it the Golden Face? No, no it’s…it’s…Tell us, precious! Tell us! What is it?”

“Love,” said Frodo Baggins sadly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaand here's Frodo! I wonder who he could be talking to?
> 
> The love riddle was heavily inspired by one which can be found in the Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart, and if you haven't read that series, I highly recommend it.


	2. Chapter 2: Frodo

A small noise sounded from behind where Frodo was seated beside Sméagol in the cave. He turned and found a young woman with long, straggly blonde hair and wide eyes standing on the shore of the pool, light from her wand flooding the color from her already-pale face.

Sméagol, who had also looked around at the noise, caught sight of her and crowed. “What is it, my precious? Can we eats it? Is it juicy?” His six teeth glittered sinisterly in the dim light of the cave.

“You can’t eat anyone here, Sméagol,” said Frodo.

Sméagol growled under his breath, but didn’t otherwise respond.

“This is Luna Lovegood,” Frodo continued. “She’s a witch from the Harry Potter books.” He turned back to smile at Luna. “Do come in, Luna, if you like. We were just having a game of riddles.”

“Thank you, Mr. Baggins,” she said, offering him a smile which, though genuine, was smaller and more pensive than was usual for her. She drifted over to sit at his side, opposite of where Sméagol was perched on the rock.

“Well? It’s your turn, Sméagol,” Frodo prompted, when Sméagol continued not to speak.

Sméagol drew back into the shadows, keeping Frodo between himself and the light of Luna’s wand. “Make the Lovegoods go first! Sméagol will go next, precious. Yess, after Lovegoods he’ll go.”

“Well, Luna?” asked Frodo, laughing a little. “Would you like to tell us a riddle?”

Luna looked thoughtful. “I’ve heard a lot of riddles from the enchanted knocker on my common room door,” she said, “but my favorite is one that my mum told me before she died:

                “ _At the end of the night, you’ll find me_

_In the rising sun,_

_And at the bottom of an empty box,_

_After despair.”_

“Hope,” said Frodo softly into the silence.

“Not fair, not fair!” wailed Sméagol. “It didn’t give poor Sméagol a chance to guess, did it, precious? And they is tricksy, they picks nasty things they know Sméagol won’t guess!”

“It’s not my fault that you’ve fallen too far to think about love or hope,” said Luna coldly. She stood up. “There is a darkness in your heart,” she continued seriously, “And you keep choosing towards it. Unless you decide to start helping yourself, there’s nothing we can do for you.”

Sméagol’s gaunt face contorted with anger, making his lamp-like eyes burn dangerously in the darkness. “Nasty witchses! Curse it and crush its bones! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it, my precious, we hates it!”

He had been edging backwards off the rock; now he turned and leapt into the dark pool behind him. He hardly left a ripple in the water—it was as if the darkness had been waiting to welcome him back in.

Frodo pushed himself to his feet, unable to help the disappointment that welled up in his heart. He smiled wanly at Luna. “Want to go for a walk?”


	3. Chapter 3: Frodo

As Frodo and Luna left the cave, the walls opened up around them, lightening with ever step they took. Soon they were strolling through the grey mist again.

“I’ve never met my mother,” Luna said. Her eyes were glassy and distant, and Frodo could tell she was looking, not at the grey bright around them, but at something inside herself. “She never actually appears on the page of my book, so she isn’t here. All I have of her are the memories that I was written with.”

Frodo felt his heart soften with pity. He, too, knew well the struggle of the many characters who were written with loved ones their audiences never got to meet. Only the characters who actually made appearances on-page showed up in the World Between Worlds.

“I’ve never met my mother either,” Frodo told her. “My parents get hardly more than a mention by my author. But we’ll meet them someday, as Bilbo likes to say,

                “ _‘After we’ve passed out of time and of dreaming,_

_Then shall our free spirits roam—_

_When the World Between Worlds has at last reached its evening:_

_That’s when we’ll truly go home.’_

"We will see them—in the Time After.”

A line of trees loomed out of the mist before them. It could have belonged to any number of universes, but as they got closer and could make out the twisting purple of the branches, the shimmering unreality of the leaves, the slithy creatures that looked like a cross between badgers, lizards, and corkscrews gyring and gimboling around a large stone sundial, Frodo had to guess that it was a part Lewis Carroll’s Tulgey Wood.

Luna picked her way carefully across the wabe, which was full of little pocks, like gopher holes, left behind by the burrowing, slithy toves, and sat down on the stump of a Tumtum tree.

“Why do you do it?” she asked abruptly, twirling a leaf between her fingers as she spoke, and Frodo knew this was what she had really wanted to talk about.

Eyes still on the leaf, not his face, Luna continued. “Why do you keep going back to visit that…”

Most wouldn’t have noticed the change in Luna’s serene expression, but Frodo had gotten to know her rather well since her arrival in the World Between Worlds, and he could see the faint curl of distaste in her lip.

“…creature?” Luna finished. She finally glanced up at him, her eyes wide and clear. “Do you really believe you can save him?”

Frodo hesitated. “I’m not sure whether I believe it. I certainly _hope_ it.” He put a careful emphasis on the word “hope” and saw Luna’s expression flicker as he spoke.

“But you can see,” she continued stubbornly, “how corrupted he is, how much he wants to choose Evil.”

Frodo watched a tove spin on its head like a gyroscope, digging a neat, circular hole in the ground by Luna’s left foot, and thought about how to answer. “I believe that if left to his own will and desires, Sméagol would choose himself into the darkness of oblivion. That’s why I keep visiting him.”

Luna lost her stiffness as a look of wonder crept into her eyes. “His will and desires have been utterly corrupted by the Ring,” she said breathlessly, “but _he_ hasn’t been. Not yet.” Her eyes flashed bright as she looked up at him for confirmation. “And you keep going back because you think you can pull him away from the edge. You think you can keep him from falling.”

Frodo didn’t bother nodding; he knew she would find the truth of her words in his face. “I almost Fell. I would have, if Sméagol hadn’t saved me.” He held up his four-fingered hand and gave the ghost of a laugh. “I don’t know if Sméagol can be saved, but I have to try. What other purpose can this place have for me, if I don’t?”

When Luna smiled, it was like the sun slipping out of the shadow of an eclipse. “I understand now,” she said happily, and bent down to scratch a lithe, slimy badger/lizard/corkscrew behind the ears.

“That’s all you wanted, wasn’t it?” Frodo asked affectionately. “To understand.”

“Yes,” said Luna simply. She stood up, the serenity in her face complete again. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Baggins. I have to leave now; I have the end of a chess game to see.”

“It was a pleasure, Luna,” Frodo said smiling gently after her as she made her way into the mist.

Just before the grey totally obscured her, she turned back and said, “By the way, Mr. Baggins?

“Yes?”

“Don’t give up hope.” And with that, she was lost to the mist.


End file.
